Gold Stars at Work

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After a German company began privately informing its warehouse workers each month of their pay and performance rankings relative to other employees’, their productivity jumped 6.8%, on average, according to Jordi Blanes i Vidal and Mareike Nossol, of the London School of Economics. The practice suggests that telling employees how they rate is unambiguously beneficial to profitability, the researchers say.

The effect was positive for the overwhelming majority of workers—51 out of 58—and negative for just one.

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